


Tales From The Back Pages

by Traincat



Category: Fantastic Four (Comicverse), Spider-Man (Comicverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 19:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8590750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Traincat/pseuds/Traincat
Summary: Peter Parker was born with his words. Johnny Storm's been sure his will be said sarcastically since he was a child. Everything else more or less happens according to plan.A first words soulmate AU.





	

**Author's Note:**

> "I'm not going to write a soulmates AU," I told myself, "but IF I WAS GOING TO WRITE A SOULMATES AU, I would want to do something where Johnny says his to Spider-Man, but Peter says them back to Johnny." Then I pondered, "Man, I wonder how their first words to each other went down in canon."
> 
> Reader, that's exactly how it went down in canon. I had no choice. Two notes: the fic is set in modern times, and for the sake of the fic your soulmark is the first words your soulmate speaks directly to you, not the first words you hear them say.
> 
> HUGE thanks to my artist and friend, [maryjanewatson](maryjanewatson.tumblr.com)! As always you are such a fun, positive person to talk to, and I love your art and your versions of Johnny and Peter. I'm so glad you claimed my summary and I hope you had fun! ♥ The full art post is [here on tumblr](http://maryjanewatson.tumblr.com/post/153366299314).

**1\. "That's it, you animated insect!"**

Peter was born with his words. They looped haphazardly across his right side, the scrawl starting just under his collarbone and wrapping around his shoulder: _That’s it, you animated insect! Fun’s over!_

Some introduction.

“What’s animated mean?” he’d asked as a very small child, twisting to better read the last half in the mirror. From the time he could read, he’d been stretching out the necklines of his shirts, trying to get a better look whenever he could.

“Energetic!” Aunt May called from the kitchen, ever the optimist. “Fun!”

“Bugs Bunny,” Uncle Ben said, shaking out his morning paper.

“ _Ben_.”

“Yes, dear,” Uncle Ben said, shooting Peter a conspiratorial look in the mirror as he settled his hands on Peter’s shoulders. He adjusted Peter’s shirt, callused fingers skimming over the end of the words. “It means you’ve got a soulmate with a funny sense of humor. Just your luck, kiddo. ‘Fun’s over’, huh? That’s what they all say. C’mon – Her Majesty declares us late for breakfast.”

Later, though, he dug out the dictionary from the shelf and sat down on the couch with Peter and together they read over the definition of ‘animated’ – adjective, full of life or excitement; lively. Every synonym was heavy on Peter’s tongue: lively, energetic, active, vigorous, vibrant, vivacious. Alive.

A funny sense of humor, Uncle Ben had said.

The insect part didn’t hit him until years later, when he was older and pawing through every book on his aunt and uncle’s shelves on lonely weekends. He hit _The Metamorphosis_ and barely slept for a week.

“Land’s sakes, Peter,” Aunt May said when she finally weaseled the truth out of him one morning after he’d nearly fallen asleep in his wheatcakes, “I’m not raising any giant cockroaches, I don’t care _what_ those words on your shoulder say. You put it out of your mind this instant.”

He didn’t really realize until his first day of high school, how impossible his words were – not until he was looking at Liz Allan, desperate to find a way to make her call him an animated insect. She didn’t, of course – her first words to him were, “you’re blocking my locker.”

It was still better than the first time he screwed up and bumped into Flash Thompson, who he’d been trying so hard to ignore.

“That’s it,” Flash said. Peter’s heart nearly stopped, but then Flash continued, “You’re dead meat, puny!”

Small comforts, he thought as he was knocked roughly to the ground. _You animated insect._ Who was ever going to call him that, straight off the bat?

“Maybe you’ll meet them at the school play,” Aunt May suggested, her not so subtle way of trying to goad him into “putting himself out there” – her words. _Maybe you’ll meet them at the school play_ was the new _maybe you’ll meet them at soccer team tryouts._

As if Peter would ever get picked for either.

“What kind of play has that in it?” he asked, picking sullenly at his dinner.

“One about animated insects, obviously,” May said, heaping more potatoes on his plate.

Ben chuckled.

“You landed yourself a real livewire, Pete, I can tell,” he said. “I can’t wait to meet ‘em.”

He didn’t get to, of course. Peter got bit by the spider – “Animated insect,” he breathed to himself, “animated _insect_ \-- spiders aren’t insects, my soulmate’s a moron,” and then he laughed until there were tears in his eyes because finally, finally it made sense – and he was so giddy on it, the power, the surety, the feeling that this what he’d been waiting for all those miserable lonely years wondering how he was ever going to get someone to say those words to him, that he didn’t listen when Uncle Ben told him.

His power, his responsibility -- and he let that robber walk free, and now his uncle was dead.

Aunt May touched his shoulder after the funeral, over the spot where “insect” curled. Peter’s heart felt like lead. His eyes wouldn’t stop prickling.

“He was so excited for you,” she said.

Her own mark was on her right calf, hidden by thick black tights. It was a cheerful _what’s cooking, good lookin’?_ that Peter had never been able to see without hearing his uncle’s voice. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and for a long moment they just stood there, leaning together.

If it wasn’t for Spider-Man, Uncle Ben would still be alive. But if it wasn’t for Spider-Man, there’d be no _animated insect_ scrawled across his shoulder.

So Spider-Man wasn’t the problem; Peter was. What else was new.

The bills piled up on the kitchen table, late notices and envelopes with angry red warnings stamped on them. May rubbed at her forehead and told him not to worry about it.

“I’ll get a job,” he said over breakfast, months later. Aunt May tsked.

“School is your job,” she said, the same thing she’d said the last three times. This time, though, she flicked him on the shoulder, just under his words, and added, “How are you going to support that real livewire your uncle was so excited about without a good education?”

Peter scowled, pressing his own fingers hard against _insect_ through his shirt. He was strong – he didn’t even know how strong, the upper limit of what he could do now – and fast, and he could climb walls and there was that weird buzzing that warned him whenever there was danger. Money shouldn’t be a problem, not when he had all that. Aunt May should be living like a queen, not worrying about their cell phone bill.

He let himself imagine it for one guilty, heady second: the sensation of his hands tearing through a bank vault, like cardboard crumpling under his fingers.

That wasn’t right, though. That wasn’t what Ben would want from him.

Great power, great responsibility.

How that ended up with Peter webbing a camera to the side of the building to snap photos of himself in action, he didn’t know.

 

* * *

 

The Fantastic Four had crash-landed back to earth and into fame seemingly overnight, a few months before Peter was bitten. They were everywhere, on TV and magazine covers and all over the trending topics on every single social media site. If Peter had to see #flameon! one more time, he was going to throw his computer straight out the window. They were a survival story; the shuttle’s crash landing. They were a horror story; their strange new powers. And the favorite by far – they were a love story; Reed Richards and Sue Storm wore each other’s words in matching places, something every daytime show Aunt May watched gushed about endlessly.

Peter had maybe been impressed, too, before the spider.

He couldn’t stop looking, though, even though it was driving him crazy, their super powers and their maskless faces, and the way everyone just effortlessly seemed to love them. They were larger than life – the big, rocky guy, pretty literally larger than life, but the others, too. Peter had been reading Reed Richards’ work since he’d been old enough to read. Sue and Johnny Storm were, in a word, beautiful, standing together in their sky blue outfits.

Johnny Storm was barely a year older than Peter, according to wikipedia, and nobody Peter’s age had any business looking like that. Johnny looked like some kind of teen model with his soft curls and effortless smile. Nothing in life was fair. Peter sort of hated him, but just looking at him made something not quite like his newly named spider-sense creep across the back of his neck.

The Fantastic Four had the media’s love. They had the city’s approval. Best of all, they must have had money.

Why couldn’t Peter be like that, like them? He had the powers, the strength, the brains. Why couldn’t it be the Fantastic Five, he wondered, staring at a gif of them, down into the Human Torch’s flickering eyes.

He snapped the laptop closed.

The trip from Forest Hills to 42nd and Madison – to the Baxter Building – seemed to take forever. Peter’s skin felt too tight, hot all over, anticipation creeping over him. The building loomed high over head, the solution to his problems.

The crowd thronging the block and the security inside the lobby were an issue for anyone on foot, but not for Peter. He made it up to a neighboring roof, pulled on his mask, and calculated the best angle for his swing.

There was an open window. Peter couldn’t believe his luck.

What he could do in the air was impressive, sure, but getting past the kind of security the Fantastic Four were bound to have – that was an even better show of his strengths.

He stepped off the ledge, flicked his wrist, and made a connection – and then he was free, really and truly. He had never before in his life felt like he did at the height of a swing; it was what he’d always imagined flying must be like, but better.

One day he was going to do this with his soulmate. He was going to show them all of this – the glittering lights, the wind through their hair, all of the city far beneath them. Something only he could do for them. He could practically feel their arms around his neck already, the weight of them against his back. It was going to be amazing.

He connected with the high glass windows, heels and palms, and then scuttled through the open window. Too easy.

“Greetings, group!” he said, diving into the room. He tried to make his voice sound lower, gruffer. More adult. “You shouldn’t make it so easy for people to drop in on ya!”

Some kind of glass cage fell around him before he could so much as blink. Plexi-glass, he thought, boggling behind the mask. The big rocky guy smirked at him through it.

“Got news for ya, loudmouth,” he said, arms crossed against his chest. “It ain’t that easy.”

Humiliation burned in Peter’s chest. He hooked the very tips of his fingers into the seam of the doors and pulled; it came apart like tinfoil. The shame faded a little bit; his new strength never failed to soothe. The amazing Spider-Man – there was nothing he couldn’t do.

“This gizmo may keep out the riff-raff, gruesome,” he said, finding his nerves again, “but it’s a joke to me!”

Reed Richards – Dr. Reed Richards, Peter’s personal science idol – made a quiet, horrified noise.

“That device cost thousands!” he said. “If you wreck it –”

“Don’t worry, Rubberface,” the rocky one – Ben Grimm, Peter remembered from television and a hundred thousand tweets and his classmates’ stupid whispering – said. Peter’s spider-sense buzzed, just in time for him to duck a swing from one of those huge hands. “This squirt’s gonna be taught some manners!”

“Squirt!” Peter said, partly offended and mostly amused. His hands shot out like lightning, grabbing onto that huge wrist. The Thing might have been strong – probably even stronger than he was – but he was slow, weighed down by his own huge form, and Peter was so fast he made his own head spin sometimes. “If I’m a squirt, you’re a big ape! Who do you think you’re pushing around?”

He hadn’t been sure he’d be able to do it, but tossing the Thing across the room was like hurling a bowling bowl. Under the mask Peter’s mouth curved into a smirk.

“Did you forget you’re messing with a guy who has the proportionate strength of a spider?” he crowed.

Johnny Storm burst into fire, taking off towards the ceiling. It was strange – it was gorgeous, more than that, a being of fire where a second before there had stood a boy. There was an odd tug in Peter’s chest as he watched Johnny hover far above the scene, all beautiful flickering flames.

Ben Grimm had dented the wall when he’d hit it. He grumbled to himself, pulling himself back up and dusting off his huge rocky palms. “That’s what I get for pullin’ my punches on account of your size.”

Unnaturally long fingers made to grab at Peter -- he sprang out of the way last second.

“Wait a second,” Reed Richards said, frowning, still trying to restrain Peter. “We don’t _want_ to fight with strangers.”

“At least not until we know what we’re fighting about,” a woman’s disembodied voice said in Peter’s ear. His hand shot out, automatic, but there was nothing but air. Peter wasn’t the only fast one; the Invisible Woman had already slipped away.

That was fine, though; he webbed Reed’s hands to the floor.

“Who’s fighting?” he asked, somersaulting himself up and over. “Consider this a little exhibition.”

His spider-sense twinged. There was someone was behind him. He turned in time to see a rope hanging in midair. The Invisible Woman had a lasso.

“What is this, the Wild West?” Peter said, grabbing it and yanking. Sue Storm flickered into view for the briefest of seconds, scowling, before she disappeared again. _Left_ his senses told him, but the rush of heat on his right was of more immediate concern.

Johnny Storm swooped in, face an angry blur through his flames. Peter’s breath caught in his lungs, that inexplicable tug in his chest sharpened, and then the Human Torch opened his mouth –

“That’s _it_ , you animated insect! Fun’s over!”

For one moment, time stopped. Peter’s ears rang. His mouth went dry. His fingertips tingled. He felt a little like he’d been struck by lightning, or like he was drowning at the bottom of the ocean, or like he did at the very top of a swing.

It was incredible. It was terrifying. It was a hundred thousand times more than any story he’d ever read about it.

The Human Torch had said his words. The Human Torch was his – his soulmate, his everything. Just his. Hysterical laughter bubbled up, but it never actually reached Peter’s lips.

 _Say something, you idiot_ , he told himself. _Say something back to him, say_ the words _already_ \-- but everything coming to mind was awful, things he didn’t want on Johnny’s skin, his near-constant rattling thought of, _do you really not know spiders aren’t insects_ , or, _I never imagined the emphasis on ‘it’._

From the first moment Peter had seen him burst into flames, he’d known Johnny deserved better.

Johnny had him trapped in a ring of fire. For one horrible moment Peter thought he was going to open his mouth and say, _I went down, down, down, but the flames went higher._

But the joke was on him: he couldn’t say anything at all. It was like his jaw has welded itself shut.

A wall of blue saved him. Reed Richards had stretched himself across the room, effectively separating Peter from Johnny. It was a strange sight, but beyond that – it was both the worst thing in the world and an incredible relief to be cut off from Johnny.

Suddenly he felt like could breathe again.

“Stop!” Reed said. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Spider-Man – why are you here? What do you think you’re doing?”

Peter dragged in a breath, willing his shoulders to relax, his hands to unclench. He kept his eyes resolutely on Reed Richards, and not on Johnny, flickering bright over his shoulder. These couldn’t be his first words to Johnny. It wouldn’t be right. He deserved better. He had to give Johnny something better.

His gaze never wavered from Reed’s face as he said, “Finally, someone asks me. I came here to join up with you. I came here to be a member of the Fantastic Four.”

He’d thought he’d come for the money, but that wasn’t true. He’d come here for Johnny. Something in him had known that this was where Johnny was, and pulled him here, a helpless orbit. He’d been meant to hear to Johnny say those words today.

Everything in Peter was electric.

It was Ben who spoke first, a rumbling, incredulous laugh. “Are you serious?”

“Spider-Man,” Sue Storm said, fading back into sight. She looked so much like her brother that Peter was struck by it all over again: the same fine bone structure, the same blonde hair and the same eyes. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. The Fantastic Four aren’t a team. We’re a family.”

“And we ain’t accepting applications,” Ben Grimm added, voice rough.

“Bet he came for Reed’s money,” Johnny scoffed. He was still on fire, hovering above; his words crackled like a bonfire.

Shame settled heavy in Peter’s stomach, hot in his cheeks. _Say something_ , every rational part of him screamed, but he couldn’t. He had to get out, he had to leave. He needed air.

“Fine,” he bit out. He kept his eyes on Ben Grimm as he said it. He couldn’t let that be the thing stamped on Johnny’s skin. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t what he wanted for him. “Be like that!”

Then he was swinging back out the window, into the muggy New York air. His eyes prickled. His lungs burned. Someone shouted after him to come back; he hoped against hope that it was Johnny, but realized a second later that it was Reed.

He swung until he was far away, until his arms and shoulders ached with the strain of it, and then he dropped, taking shelter in a tiny space between two buildings. He clung to the wall, ripping his mask off and curling in on himself.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he said, eyes blurring hot and wet. He pressed his forehead to his knees and dug his fingers into his messy hair. “He said it! He said it and you couldn’t even say anything back to him!”

He could have said _oh, it’s you_ \-- a respectable number of people had _oh, it’s you_ or _you said them_ written on them. Peter hadn’t even been able to manage that.

He unfolded himself, scrubbing at his wet cheeks with his knuckles. He had to go back. He had to go back and say, _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it was you. I was looking for you._

But he hadn’t been. He’d been looking for money, for an easy way out, for things he didn’t deserve. And Johnny had known that with one look at him – “he came for Reed’s money.”

His hands were trembling.

“Okay,” he said to himself, steadying them. “Deep breaths. Deep breaths. You’re Spider-Man.” One more long inhale, count to ten, breathe out. “You’re _Spider-Man_ , dammit.”

He pulled the mask back on, dropped down to the ground, and went to find something to hit.

Luckily New York didn’t fail to deliver. The Chameleon, the Vulture, and a never-ending supply of muggers and petty thieves for him to leave webbed up by their ankles.

The money thing even started to work itself out thanks, ironically, to J Jonah Jameson’s personal crusade against him. Peter had never felt so lucky to be hated.

And if he’d clipped out a picture of Johnny from stupid celebrity gossip magazine – some paparazzi shot of him and Ben Grimm leaving a coffee shop together, Johnny’s head thrown back with laughter – and stuck it in his wallet, or if he jealously watched a video the youtube star Johnny was dating had put up featuring him, golden and laughing and threatening to draw a mustache on her with eyeliner, that was his business. If he went through Johnny’s public instagram and his twitter, looking for hints about his words – just a starting point, just something to help him get over all the white noise in his head – well, it was the one thing he couldn’t blame himself for.

Johnny never mentioned anything about his words, though, and he kept himself covered in that sky blue suit or in leather jackets and tight jeans. He was gorgeous in every photo, though -- the smiling selfies, the posed magazine photos. Even in a photo Peter found on Ben Grimm’s twitter, Johnny soaked through and scowling, flipping the camera off – he wasn’t to be believed. He shone, as simple as that.

He’d go back to Baxter Building, Peter told himself. He’d find the right words and he’d go there. He’d take his mask off and he’d say them and it would be perfect.

Maybe tomorrow, he thought to himself, lip caught between his teeth and fingers pressed to his own words. He thumb hovered over the little Instagram heart on a shot of Johnny at the beach, posing with his sister, both their arms held out akimbo.

He’d been saying “maybe tomorrow” for a lot of nights.

 

* * *

 

“The damn hospital’s not letting anyone in! If only we could get something out of this Dr. Octopus –”

“I don’t think sensationalizing this is a good idea, Jonah,” Robbie said, shaking his head. Peter, who was still waiting to see if Jonah was going to cough up for his latest shots, kept his mouth shut for once in his life and just listened.

“We’re a newspaper!” Jonah said, banging his hand down against the desk, loud enough to rattle. “All we do is sensationalize things! That’s how newspapers sell copies, which is how you put food on the table.”

“And how you put more locks on the doors,” Robbie interjected, “to keep you safe from all the enemies you’ve made.”

“Guy blows himself up, welds extra arms onto his torso!” Jonah said, waving his hands around. “Now that’s a real story, unlike these photos Parker here brought me of Spider-Man putting those cats in that tree –”

“He was getting them out of the tree,” Peter corrected. “Spider-Man was rescuing the cats from the tree.”

“Just webbing all those poor, defenseless cats up there, that menace.”

“One of them scratched him,” Peter added mournfully.

“I agree that the Spider-Man and cat conflict isn’t gripping,” Robbie interrupted. Peter huffed, sinking down further into the chair. The claws had been pretty gripping, in his opinion. Sharp and gripping. “But I think we can find a middle-ground between that and Dr. Octavius’ tragedy.”

Jonah scowled and rolled his eyes, arms crossed over his chest. “If I could even just get a _photo_ …”

Peter perked up. “I could get a photo.”

Robbie pinched at the bridge of his nose, sighing. “Peter, no.”

“Parker, yes!” Jonah said, lighting up like the fourth of July. “You get me a photo of this Doc Ock, kid, and I’ll pay you triple what I have for your last couple Spider-Man photos combined!”

“Jonah, he’s a kid, don’t get him in trouble,” Robbie snapped.

“I already get pictures of Spider-Man, how hard can it be to get one picture of Dr. Octavius?” Peter said. Not to mention he’d admired Octavius’ work for a while -- he wanted to know what was going on with him, too. “Quadruple the fee for my last set of photos, Jonah, and you’ve got a deal.”

Jonah’s grin was huge. “Kid’s a shark! I love it. Triple and you got yourself a deal, Parker.”

“Be careful, at least,” Robbie said, sighing.

Peter grinned.

 

* * *

 

Breaking into the hospital wasn’t an issue – he webbed the cameras and scaled the walls. It was dark inside, though, which he thought was strange, but then he’d heard they’d cleared everyone except Otto Octavius out.

That was weird, too. He hadn’t really thought about that part until right that moment.

There was a light on in one window. Peter crawled towards it.

Something flashed chrome. Peter froze, spider-sense buzzing. He stayed very still, and after a second he heard snatches of voices: “—Gotten you the equipment you wanted! When will you let us go?”

A cruel snap, “Not until I’m ready!”

Peter lifted his head just enough to see through the window. His eyes widened behind the mask. Dr. Octavius was inside the hospital room, mixing some kind of chemicals, and the stories were true – he had fused himself to some kind of machinery. Four long metal arms slithered sinisterly, handling beakers and instruments.

He could control them, Peter realized, use them just like his own arms. Cool, if a little creepy.

Then he saw the other people: two nurses sitting seemingly frozen in fear, and a man in a suit. The man was the one yelling, pointing one accusing finger at Dr. Octavius.

“This is insane!” he said. “You have no right –”

Those long metal arms moved so fast it made Peter’s head spin.

“Right?” Dr. Octavius shouted, lifting the man off his feet and slamming him back against the wall. Anger prickled down Peter’s spine; his eyes narrowed. “You dare speak to me of right? I have the right to do anything – as long as I have the power! And if you doubt my power --”

“No, don’t!” the man said, panicked and struggling. “Let me down!”

“Here’s a small sample,” Octavius said, hefting the man in the air again as easily as if he weighed nothing.

Peter had seen more than enough. It was time to stop staring and start hitting anything with squirming metal arms. The window shattered as he threw himself through it; startled, Octavius dropped his captive. The man landed on the floor in an ungainly sprawl, but he seemed alright. Peter moved to cover him just in case.

“Hold it, doc,” he said. “How about picking on somebody who can fight back?”

“Spider-Man!” Octavius hissed.

“Well,” Peter said, blocking the door, “it sure ain’t Albert Schweitzer!”

Not even a laugh; Peter’s one chance to use that joke and it had fallen flatter than the state of Kansas.

Octavius was red in the face, his hair sweaty. He didn’t look well. Peter was already writing the fight off as an easy one – super-strong metal arms, the guy might have, but he wasn’t exactly in-shape, and Peter had lifted a storage container clear above his head while practicing down by the docks the other day. Easy, breezy, beautiful, but so much for a night’s excitement.

“You dare speak flippantly to _me_?” Dr. Octavius demanded, spittle at the corners of his mouth. Peter had always somehow thought superhero fights would be more attractive; just one more disappointment from the world.

“Actually, I’m speaking to them,” Peter said, glancing over his shoulder at the two nurses. “This guy! Am I right, ladies?”

They gasped as his spider-sense blared; two of the metal arms shot out towards him, wicked claws gleaming.

“When I’m finished with you, you’ll sing a different tune!” Octavius shouted as Peter leapt nimbly out of the way. He was pretty sure the accident had done a little more damage than just the fun new appendages – Octavius sounded crazed.

“You don’t think those dumb-looking flappers of yours can move fast enough to catch Spider-Man, do you?” Peter taunted, springing back. His spider-sense let him know one of the arms was coming up on the left – no, it was the right – no –

A metal arm struck him hard across the cheek, sending his sprawling back. Peter raised a hand to his stinging face, stunned. He’d never been hit like that, not since the spider-bite.

“Surprised?” Octavius sneered down at him. “Doctor Octopus is far more powerful than you dreamed! Far more powerful than even you!”

Peter hissed a little, crawling backwards as he tried to stop his head from spinning. He really didn’t like it when the bad guys started talking in third person.

Two of the arms shot out again; Peter reacted on instinct, throwing his hands out wrists up and webbing the creepy claws at the ends of those long arms.

“Don’t let that lucky punch go to your head, pal!” he said, staggering to his feet. “I have a few more surprises!”

“Ah!” Octavius, or Doctor Octopus or whatever, gasped. He looked almost delighted, face splitting in a smile. He brought the arms back in close to examine the webbing. “A spider’s web for a Spider-Man. Most ingenious of you!”

“Thanks, I think,” Peter said. “But now it’s time for all good loonies to say good night!”

Ock actually laughed. The other two arms shot out, too fast for Peter to shoot another web. His head pounded even without his spider-sense screaming in surround sound. Peter grabbed for the arms instead, trying to use his superior strength to keep them away from him.

“But as you can see,” Octavius gestured, “holding just two of my arms isn’t enough.”

Then he raised the arms above his head and, with a horrible snapping sound, he broke Peter’s webbing.

Peter’s eyes went wide behind his mask; that had never happened before, either. He felt suddenly afraid, a white hot stab of panic, an itch under his skin. He’d forgotten this, too – what it felt like to really be scared. His heart beat wildly against his ribs.

Peter only had two hands; Otto had six. He tried to stifle a gasp as two more metal arms came at him.

“And now, Spider-Man, I grow bored with this game,” Octavius declared breezily. “My time is too valuable!”

Those inhumanly strong metal arms grabbed at his wrists and ankles, wrestling him into the air. Peter couldn’t get any leverage. The arms reeled him in close until he was staring down into Octavius’ face, held immobile.

Octavius made a considering noise, and then he slapped Peter across the face with his flesh-and-blood hand.

It barely stung, but humiliation burned in Peter’s chest, worse than the metal’s cruel grip.

“You dared mock me before,” Octavius said, smirking. “Why aren’t you mocking me now? Where are your brave words and taunts, Spider-Man? Or do you realize you’ve finally met your master?”

For once, Peter’s big mouth failed him. Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, Octavius’ grin faded. He seemed bored again.

“Now you can leave the way you entered,” he said, dismissive. The metal arms flung Peter like a rag doll, back through the broken window.

Peter’s head spun; he tried to shoot a webline to anchor himself, but missed, and instead he hit a tree on the way down. It broke his fall, at least, even if it left him hurting in an entirely different way than Otto Octavius’ mocking words had. Sprawled out on the grass, he remembered the slap of Octavius’ hand. His eyes stung.

He’d beaten him. Peter hadn’t even given him a good fight – it had been entirely Dr. Octopus’ game. He’d never lost a fight before, not since the spider-bite. He spent a long time lying there on the grass, trying not to stain his mask with tears. His breathing was ragged in his own ears. He’d thought he was unbeatable, but Doc Ock had tossed him around like a rag doll.

For the first time, it occurred to him that he wasn’t invincible now. For the first time, he thought that maybe being Spider-Man had just been him fooling himself. He was still plain old Peter Parker, deep down, and plain old Peter Parker couldn’t do this. He wasn’t meant for this.

This was why he hadn’t been able to say anything to Johnny. Deep down, Peter had always known he was a failure, that he didn’t deserve him. He still wanted him in that moment, guilty, longing.

Something was moving along the hospital wall; Peter rolled over and watched as Octavius climbed from the building, disappearing into the dark. Go after him, that nagging little voice told him, but Peter ached from the fall and stung all over from Octavius’ defeat. He could still feel where he’d slapped him across the face.

What was he going to do if he followed Octavius? Lose again?

No, instead he called the police, secure in the knowledge that they could handle the situation at the hospital now that Octavius had fled to greener pastures. Then he changed out of his costume and into civilian clothes and limped to the nearest subway station, and then from the train he somehow managed to drag himself home.

The kitchen light clicked on while he was fishing a bag of pineapple chunks out of the freezer and he just stood there, caught like a deer in the headlights. Aunt May stared at him, eyebrows drawn together in concern.

“Peter?” she said. “What are you doing?”

“We, uh,” he said, caught bruised and red-handed, suit thankfully stuffed at the bottom of his backpack. “We -- we didn’t have any ice.”

Then, horribly, his shoulders started to shake and his face felt too hot and all of a sudden he was crying in the kitchen at ten o’clock at night.

“Oh, sweetheart,” May said, pulling him into her arms. He’d been taller than her since he was thirteen; he had to fold himself up to put his forehead down against her shoulder. “Oh, honey. Shh, shh. Peter.”

They ended up on the couch, him curled in the corner with the frozen pineapple chunks somehow turned into a real ice pack and his grandmother’s old knit blanket thrown over his knees. He’d never met her, but he’d always liked the way the throw smelled, a little dusty and brittle and like home.

His eyes were dry, but they still felt hot and itchy. There was a horrible aching hole in his chest; it had been there since he’d swung out of the Baxter Building without saying anything back to Johnny, but tonight it was a hundred times worse.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Aunt May asked.

Peter sniffed and shrugged, laying the barest bones of his night down in front of her: the Bugle, the job he never should have taken, his own smart mouth. No Spider-Man or Doctor Octopus, not that it mattered – she still looked stricken.

“Oh, Peter,” she said, hand over his. “I told you, I told you I didn’t want you taking that job. It’s too dangerous – look at your poor face.”

“I know,” he said, swiping at his eyes and thinking, _forget my face, you should feel my shoulder_. “I know, I’m sorry, I’ll quit. It’s over anyway. I’m done.”

Spider-Man was done.

Aunt May made a quiet noise. “I know it feels like the end of the world now, but you’re young, Peter. There will be other, better jobs – and when you’re the scientist you’ve always wanted to be ever since you were a little boy, you won’t have to put yourself in danger chasing after Spider-Man.”

He pressed at his dry, itchy eyes with the heel of his hand. “Don’t worry, Aunt May. No more chasing after Spider-Man.”

She was quiet for a minute, just touching the hand holding the ice pack, running her thumb back and forth over the knob of his wrist. “There’s something else, too, isn’t there?”

Peter sniffed and shook his head, pressing his icepack miserably against his sore face. “Just a long night, Aunt May. I’ll be okay. Honest.”

For a long moment she just let him brood. When she spoke again it was gently, but with the weight of a history always just out of Peter’s grasp. “Your father used to get that same line between his eyebrows when he was thinking too hard about something.”

Peter shifted the ice pack, and finally let himself say it: “I met my soulmate.”

“Oh, Peter,” she said, a quiet gasp. “I don’t know what to ask first – how? When? _Who_?”

Peter sniffed. “It’s not important, it’s – they’re perfect. Unbelievable, kind of.” He swiped at his eyes, vision blurring. “But it’s not going to work. I shouldn’t – I should just stay away.”

The truth had been there from the start, but never clearer to him than tonight. How could he go back to Johnny, defeated, a quitter, a coward? Not a hero. Not anything Johnny deserved.

“Oh, Peter,” Aunt May said, laughing a little. “Only _you_.”

“Only me, what?” he said, mildly offended.

“Only you would find your soulmate and then make things so difficult for yourself,” she said. She reached out to dry his face with the back of her fingers. “Call me an old romantic if you want, but Peter … this is the one person in the world who was made for you.”

Peter could feel it, in his chest, the hook in his heart, the invisible line stretching across Queens, over the bridge, back to Johnny. If he closed his eyes he could almost see him in his spacious home, maybe watching television, maybe talking to his sister. Maybe asleep already, and hopefully dreaming something sweet.

“What did you say back?” Aunt May asked, stroking his cheek.

“Nothing,” Peter admitted. “I – I froze up, I couldn’t speak. I just bailed. I know what you’re saying, Aunt May, but I – I’m no good. How can I put this all on someone else?”

Maybe he’d said too much. He worried all the time, watched his words as much as he could, but his actions spoke for themselves. He was always afraid that one day she’d look at him and she’d just _know_.

He didn’t know what would happen, after that.

“Oh, Peter,” she said, and pulled him into her arms again, his forehead down against her narrow shoulder. His icepack was crushed awkwardly between them, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Her hand stroked through his hair. “That’s just not true.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he confessed.

“What does your heart tell you?” she asked.

“To go to bed for the next year,” Peter said. May huffed a little laugh, hand cupped to the back of his head.

“Okay, don’t listen to your heart,” she said. “Listen to me. Peter, this is going to be amazing. This is going to be so amazing. You just need to go there, go up to them, look them straight in the eye and – speak.”

“What if I say the wrong thing?” Peter asked.

“Well, that’s the beauty of it,” May said. “You can’t say the wrong thing. Whatever comes out of your mouth – no matter how silly, no matter how ridiculous – that’s the right thing to say. Take it from the woman who has _what’s cookin’, good lookin’?_ printed on her leg. Lord, when Ben said that…”

Peter laughed in spite of himself, sniffling around it. “You didn’t have to say _eggs, over easy_ , you know.”

“It was the only thing I could cook at the time,” she said. “I had to let him know what he was getting into.”

“You were the waitress, not the chef,” Peter said, laughing in earnest now. This had been one of his favorite stories, when he was little – the story of how his aunt and uncle had met.

“You think anybody wants that to be their words? Eggs, over easy?” May said. “But when I said them… oh, Peter, you should have seen his face. I never saw anybody light up that way. I thought it was the most incredible thing I’d ever see.” She scrunched her fingers in her hair. “And I thought that until the day your mother put you in my arms for the first time. And you were so small, with these bizarre words on your tiny shoulder – animated insect. Tiny little letters. I could barely read them. And I thought, how amazing is this boy’s life going to be?”

Peter sniffed again, shutting his eyes.

“Peter,” Aunt May said. “You have to let it be amazing.”

 

* * *

 

Let your life be amazing, Aunt May had said. Feel free to skip school tomorrow, she hadn’t.

He thought, for two whole stops on the subway, about taking off, about doing something different for the day, but what was there to do? Spider-Man was over and done. What was Peter going to do, catch a movie with his last few Bugle dollars?

Jameson had been surprisingly kind on the phone when Peter told him he hadn’t been able to get the photos, but he could hear the disappointment in his voice. He’d been quiet for a long moment when Peter had said he probably wouldn’t have anymore photos at all, actually.

“Well, if you change your mind, you know where to bring them,” Jameson had said at last. “Lord knows nobody else would pay you good money for those shots, but me, I’m generous like that.” Gruffly, “You take care of yourself, Parker.”

Everyone was talking when Peter got to school.

“Hi, Peter!” Jessica Cambell called, a flash of brown hair and purple shirt at the corner of his vision. He felt bad about ignoring her, but he didn’t have words left in him today. There was nobody who could understand.

Behind him, Flash made a loud crack about him missing his favorite test tube. Peter couldn’t even manage to work up the energy to heckle him about the bad joke.

Jessica wasn’t so easily dodged, though. She caught up with him, jogging along.

“Peter? Did you hear?” she asked, practically bouncing on her heels. “The governor’s asked the Fantastic Four to deal with Doctor Octopus!”

“They’re busy with something else,” Liz said, coming up on his other side. She had her head ducked, scrolling through something on her phone. “But apparently the Human Torch is going to be speaking at our assembly today.”

Peter bit the inside of his cheek. That was exactly what his day needed: to be sitting in the auditorium with his soulmate up on stage, beautiful and untouchable, thinking Peter was just another nobody in the crowd.

Without Spider-Man, Peter really was just another nobody in the crowd.

Johnny looked nervous up on stage – or maybe he felt nervous. There was a kind of cagey tension trapped in Peter’s chest that he knew wasn’t all his own. Peter dropped his gaze to his own shoes, arms folded across his chest.

“I was asked here to help tackle Doctor Octopus,” Johnny announced to the crowd, “but I’ve used my flame so much recently, I have to wait a few days to let it get strong again.”

Peter, startled, finally looked at him again – he hadn’t known that Johnny had limits on his powers, that he could run out of fire. Looking at him, really letting himself look for the first time since he’d stepped into the auditorium, he saw that Johnny looked tired, his shoulders a little slumped, his eyes not quite as bright as usual.

Peter wanted to hold him. He wedged his hands a little more securely under his armpits, accidentally knocking an elbow into Liz.

“What is wrong with you today?” she hissed, scooting away.

He shrugged, guilty -- _that’s my soulmate up there, and he doesn’t even know it_ wasn’t something he could say.

Johnny talked for a while, at one point even drawing an incorrect equation in flame and joking that it was the kind of result he got when the Thing helped him with his homework. For the most part Peter just let the sound of Johnny’s voice wash over him. It did something to him, soothed his raw nerves – at least until he started feeling pathetic all over again.

It was easy, he thought, to have Johnny’s confidence, his ease, when he’d never been beaten, humiliated the way Peter had been the other night.

“Now for a parting thought!” Johnny said, roughly around the eighth time the principal pointedly cleared her throat. Peter could say one thing for his soulmate: he loved to talk. “Stay in school and do your best! Don’t feel down if sometimes it seems tough. The important thing is to never give up! Remember that – never give up!”

Peter wanted to write it off as just a corny closing – stay in school? Really? – but there was a gravity in Johnny’s voice that made him sit up and start really paying attention.

“Ability alone isn’t enough! That’s one lesson I’ve learned from my partnership with the Fantastic Four,” Johnny continued. His gaze flitted over the crowd again and, for one heart stopping moment, lit on Peter. In that moment it felt like they were the only people in the room, as if Johnny was speaking directly to him. “Even the Fantastic Four have had defeats – but we always came back!” Johnny stepped forward with that movie star grin, and finished, jokingly, “Our motto is never say die!”

For one second Peter couldn’t think. He couldn’t speak. All around him his classmates were clapping, and up onstage Johnny was taking a mocking little bow, laughing, and all Peter could think was, _he’s right._

One defeat. Just one. How could Peter have been so ready to let that be the end of Spider-Man? How could he have been willing to let go of that life? How could he have been willing to sacrifice the future he was supposed to have: Spider-Man, and Johnny?

Johnny had left the stage. Peter had expected him to leave, but instead he seemed content to mingle, signing autographs and posing for photos. Peter’s feet were carrying him forward before he even registered it.

He reached through the crowd, just barely managing to touch Johnny on the shoulder, over the same spot where Peter’s own words lay. A reasonable percentage of soulmates had words in matching spots. Peter hoped that was true. He hoped Johnny’s words lay just under his hand.

His fingers tingled, electric, and finally, as Johnny turned towards him questioningly, he found his voice.

“I want to thank you for that speech,” he said. “I’ll never forget what you said today. It meant a lot to me!”

Johnny’s jaw dropped, but Peter couldn’t wait. He squeezed Johnny’s shoulder -- _I promise I’ll be back_ \-- and then he turned on his heel and ran as fast as he could.

First, Doc Ock. Then, his soulmate.

 

* * *

 

**2\. “I want to thank you for that speech.”**

Johnny’s words started at the small of his back. By the time he’d been old to read he’d mastered twisting around to get a good look at it in the mirror. The letters were spidery, like the writer was nervous, but they showed bold against his skin. When he’d been a kid Johnny had liked to rest his press his thumb against the end of them -- _meant a lot to me_. It had used to make him smile.

Maybe it wasn’t romantic like the elegant loops of writing that hung beneath his sister’s collarbones like a necklace, tiny twisting sentences about how the color of her eyes was unique in the universe ( _I’m sorry, I’m nervous, was that too much?_ ). But – it promised Johnny that someday he’d say something, and it would mean so much to someone that they’d be meant for each other.

That had to be special, didn’t it?

“Of course it’s special,” Sue always said, smiling as she flicked Johnny’s hair back from his forehead. “Look at my little brother. Someone’s bright light.”

He always grinned and ducked his head, happy heat in his cheeks. He had that. When his father stumbled into the house in the middle of the night, or when the power got turned off and Sue and Dad screamed at each other for an hour, or when Sue told him he had to be very quiet because Dad was still sleeping even though it was almost four in the afternoon – he had that. _It meant a lot to me._

Then one day when he was nine he knocked over the vase in the hall, the one that had been his mother’s favorite, and it shattered into a thousand pieces all over the floor. He’d been trying to pick them up when his dad thundered down the stairs in his undershirt and the pants he’d worn the day before, his sweaty hair stuck to his forehead.

He grabbed Johnny by the front of his shirt and pulled him in until his red face was the only thing Johnny could see and his stale breath was all he could smell and he yelled at him, even as Sue whirled into the room, shouting.

Johnny only heard pieces from either of them over the ringing in his ears – his dad’s “why can’t you ever look where you’re going, Mary’s _vase_ , God, Mary –” and Sue’s “put him down, Dad, it’s not his fault, I broke it, it was me, Dad, there’s _glass_ on the floor!”

At the end his dad let him go and he fell backwards against Sue, her hands the only thing holding him up. His eyes blurred with unshed tears. His skin felt too hot and too tight.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for his dad. Sue pulled him backwards, further away, her arms tight across his chest. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Mary’s vase, Christ. I need a drink. You didn’t mean to,” his father repeated, quiet, defeated, as he started up the stairs again. “Some speech. Those words on your back really are a joke.”

It shot through him like an arrow, worse than the screaming or his dad’s red face or the gash on his palm where a piece of the shattered vase had cut him. He started crying in earnest and Sue spun him around, her cool hands on his face, wiping at his tears, pushing his hair back from his forehead.

“Shhh, shhh,” she said. “Dad didn’t mean it. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Shhh, Johnny.”

Johnny cried until he was sick, though, more than he’d ever cried before, until Sue made him go to bed in the middle of the afternoon. She put a cold wet towel on his forehead and sat on the edge of his bed, working on her homework and gnawing on the edge of her thumbnail.

“You can’t take him seriously,” she said every couple of minutes. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying when he gets like this. He’s mad at himself, not at you.”

“Was he right?” Johnny croaked eventually, hand pressed to the end of his words under the blankets.

“It’s just a vase,” Sue soothed.

Johnny opened his mouth to ask again, then closed it. It didn’t matter. Something had already shifted in his head – a warm tone and a smiling mouth transformed into a sneer. _I want to thank you for that speech_ , now a scoff.

It made sense. He turned over and buried his face in his pillow.

He woke up late into the night to a heavy hand stroking his hair back.

“You look so much like her,” his dad said softly. “You and Susan both. Go back to sleep. It’s okay. I’m sorry.”

Johnny, exhausted, let sleep drag him back under.

His dad left shortly after that and never came home again.

 

* * *

 

Aunt Marygay’s house was full of books about divining your future soulmate based on your words – the character of the handwriting, the weight of the lines, where the words were marked on your body, whether certain words were good luck or bad.

Johnny, who had never been much for reading, devoured all of them the summer he turned fourteen, lying on the living room carpet with his legs kicked up in the air and the latest book – he was going by how funny he found the titles – open in front of him.

One book told Johnny that, since his words started at the center of his back and wrapped around his right side, his soulmate would be faithful and true. Another book told him his love was doomed to misunderstanding and confusion, and that there would always be a part of his soulmate he couldn’t reach.

Aunt Mary said it was all nonsense.

“Then why do you own so many?” Johnny asked, rolling over onto his back to stare up at the white ceiling with its peeling patches.

“Maybe I just like to read,” said Mary. She was a small woman with thick grey hair she kept tied back and hands that always had dirt under her nails, from the garage or the garden. Johnny was pretty sure she didn’t really like him, which was fine. What mattered was that she was letting him live with her while Sue finished her degree. He didn’t need her to like him. He just needed to stay off her last nerve.

The best they got along was in the garage. Aunt Mary loved cars; she’d had three husbands, and the last was Mr. Swenson of Swenson’s Garage. They’d divorced due to what Aunt Mary claimed was a gambling hobby, but they’d bonded over their love of cars.

Johnny got it, the first time Aunt Mary had shown him the old turquoise Thunderbird in the garage. Cars had made him nervous since the crash that had killed his mother and destroyed his father, but all that vanished the second he put his hands on that one.

Aunt Mary, leaning in the doorway with a cigarette and a critical looks, said, “You like her?”

“I think I’m in love,” Johnny said.

“Well,” Aunt Mary said, taking a drag of her cigarette. “I just might have a job for you.”

Johnny grew up in that house, in the shadow of Aunt Mary’s library, and in Swenson’s Garage, until at sixteen he towered over them both. He looked older than he was, too, with the same cool good looks as his sister and plenty of lean muscle from long hours on the job. He liked the long appreciative stares he was starting to draw, the buzz he got from someone else’s hands on him.

Some people waited until they were eighty to meet their soulmate. Johnny wasn’t going to be like Aunt Mary, who had never heard her words and, if what his dad had said once was true, probably never would. _It meant a lot to me_ always echoed snide in his head now. Why should Johnny wait around for that? Be old and sad, collecting hundreds of books on the subject and whittling the years away? He didn’t want that – he wanted to feel _something_ , a hot itch under his skin.

That was how he ended up climbing in Sandra Goldman’s window in the middle of the night, and why he let Greg Whitlaw screw him up against a sweet little cherry red convertible in the back of Swenson’s Garage.

Greg tapped at his words after, and it made something hot and unpleasant burn in the pit of Johnny’s stomach.

“That’s cute,” Greg said, grinning with teeth. Greg’s words were a block-lettered accusation running down his right thigh: _you stole my parking space, jackass._

“All of me is cute,” Johnny bit out, shoving him off. He fumbled with his jeans, suddenly not having fun anymore.

“You should be a public speaker,” Greg said. He and Johnny had gone to school together since seventh grade; Greg knew exactly how bad Johnny was at public speaking. At words in general. His fingers curled into a fist of their own accord.

That was how he ended up punching Greg, and how Greg ended up nearly breaking Johnny’s nose in retribution, and how, of course, the blame ended up on Johnny in the end. It was the end of that friendship with benefits. It was the end of Johnny’s official job at Swenson’s, too.

“Did you start it?” Aunt Mary asked, sitting with him on the back porch that night. She was smoking a cigarette, and Johnny watched the end of it burn, the curl of smoke in the air.

“If you’re asking if I hit him first, then yeah,” Johnny said, staring at the scuffed toes of his sneakers. The night was too quiet, the gentle rustle of the breeze and the hum of insects pressing on him, stifling. He felt like he was coming out of his skin.

He could still feel the touch of Greg’s hand against his words, electrically wrong. He shouldn’t have ever looked at him the way he had in the first place, up through his eyelashes in a poor imitation of the _fuck me_ eyes he saw models make in magazines, actors in movies. But Johnny was so hollow inside, and he just wanted to feel _something_.

“Did he deserve it?” Aunt Mary asked after a beat, taking a long drag.

Johnny sniffed, scrubbing at his hot, dry eyes with one hand, and didn’t answer.

Aunt Mary’s hand landed heavy on the back of his neck, shaking him a little.

“Go inside, do the dishes,” she said. “I’ll phone that attack dog you call a sister and tell her what happened before she sees that shiner you’ve got and comes down here herself.”

Johnny shut his eyes against the sting; he wished, more than anything, that Sue _would_ see him and rush to the rescue, take him with her to Central City, California, to somewhere he could breathe, where the sun was bright all the time and nobody knew him at all.

He missed Sue so much.

That night he scrubbed at his skin in the shower until it felt raw, water turned up as hot as it would go, and then he huddled in bed, curled in on himself, his own hand protectively laid over his words as if he could banish any foreign touch.

His phone went off before he could fall asleep. It was Sue, FaceTiming him, and he almost let it drop, but he wanted her familiar face too much. He sat up in bed and accepted the call.

“Lights on, baby brother,” Sue said, first thing. Her hair was swept up away from her face and her smile was wry. He noticed her neck was bare; Sue always wore scarves. “Let me see the extent of the damage.”

Sighing, Johnny flicked on the light. He saw Sue wince in sympathy, reaching out before pulling her hand back.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said.

Sue looked like she wanted to say something, but instead she only nodded. “Okay. Hey, this isn’t actually what I called about. Can I introduce you to somebody?”

“What, now?” Johnny said, gesturing at the darkness outside the window, the fresh bruise on his face.

“He won’t care. He wants to meet you,” Sue said. “Please, Johnny? It’s important to me.”

What about what was important to him, he wanted to ask. What about the promise she’d made him for his birthday, that this was the last year he was going to have to spend at Aunt Mary’s, that she’d stop renting out a room and instead get an apartment where he could come live with her, the way she’d promised when she’d first left for California?

Aunt Mary was fine, but he wanted to live with his sister like she’d promised.

“Fine,” Johnny said. “Whatever.”

“You’re going to love him,” Sue said, looking – flustered? Nervous? Johnny had never seen either expression on her face before. Sue had always seemed like she could do anything, like nothing scared her.

A man’s indistinct voice floated in from off camera.

“Yes, you can come back in now,” Sue said, and a moment later she was reaching out, taking a long-fingered hand in her own and pulling a lanky man down to sit next to her. He grinned at the camera, looking awkward and nervous and deliriously happy all at once.

“Johnny,” Sue said. “This is Reed. Reed, this is my brother.”

“Hi, Johnny,” Reed said. “It’s really great to meet you.”

His shirt was open at the neck and Sue’s handwriting looped just above prominent collarbones: _You’re pretty cute yourself, for a nerd._

Johnny burst out laughing. “Really, Sue?”

“It was the first thing that came to mind!” she said. Her face was red, but she was beaming, the happiest he’d ever seen her, and suddenly he was grinning too, eyes all prickly and heart about to beat out of his chest. She’d actually found him, her soulmate.

“The most romantic moment of your life!” he said. “And _that’s_ what you say?”

“I, for one, was very relieved to hear her say it,” Reed said, staring at Sue all starry-eyed.

Sue blew back into town that summer and brought Mr. The Color of Your Eyes with her. Reed was brilliant, and charming in a nerdy kind of way, and most surprising of all he really seemed to care about Johnny. He had a best friend named Ben who had his words scrawled in beautiful calligraphy between his impossibly broad shoulders. And Reed had some ridiculous dream about them all going to space together.

Johnny had heard worse ideas.

 

* * *

 

There was a moment during the crash where Johnny thought they were going to die. They couldn’t survive – the shuttle was falling and they were trapped. Ben had braced himself over Johnny like that would do any good. All his shouted reassurances were muffled by his helmet and the unbelievable roar.

Everything was so hot. Johnny felt like he was burning up.

“Don’t do this to me, kid,” Ben was saying. “I’m not dyin’ here and neither are you, you hear me? I gotta hear her say them still.” His helmet was all smashed up; his face looked strange. “You haven’t heard ‘em either, have you, brat? Suzie said you hadn’t. That means we _live_ , Johnny!”

“Okay,” Johnny said, feeling like he was breathing in fire. Everything was so hot and hazy; he almost couldn’t make out the smile on Ben’s distorted lips.

He didn’t remember much after that.

 

* * *

 

Doris Evans had the face of an angel, the name of an eighty-year-old bridge player, and over a hundred thousand followers on youtube. Johnny desperately wanted to kiss her; the closest they’d gotten was a posed photo for her instagram, lips almost brushing, her hand against his neck.

The camera on her phone clicked and Dorrie pulled away.

“Oh, _come on_ ,” Johnny said, flopping down on her bed. Dorrie rolled her eyes, busying herself with comparing filters.

“What kind of girl do you think I am?” she asked, hand coming up to touch the back of her neck. He didn’t think she even realized how many times a day she did it. “I told you what this was when we started it.”

Dorrie Evans lived three blocks away from Aunt Mary. His first words to her had happened months before the crash, when he’d been pushed, still struggling into his shirt, from Sandra Goldman’s bedroom window and into the Evans’s hedges. She’d screamed.

“Sorry! Sorry, this isn’t what it looks like!” he’d said, sprinting across her lawn as fast as his legs would take him.

“What is WRONG with you?” she’d shouted back, sprawled on the ground where she’d fallen out of her lawn chair.

Dorrie had _I’m sorry, but are you Dorrie? I watch all your videos_ in tiny letters at the back of her neck, up by her hairline. Johnny had seen her with her hair up once, and besides she’d told him after the first time he’d tried to kiss her that.

“You’re cute, Johnny, and you’re _famous_ , which gets me viewers, but come on. Let’s not kid ourselves. Don’t you want to wait for your soulmate?” she said, staring down at her phone. “It’s romantic.”

Personally, a makeup tutorial channel wasn’t where Johnny’s mind would have gone if _I watch all your videos_ had been written on him.

“My soulmate’s not going to be like that,” Johnny said, rolling his eyes. Wait for his soulmate – if Dorrie couldn’t guess why he’d escaped out Sandra’s second story bedroom window, then Sandra’s dad running yelling down the street should have tipped her off.

“How do you know?” Dorrie mumbled to herself, rolling her eyes. “There, posted.”

Johnny sighed, conjuring up a fireball and tossing it from palm to palm.

“You know I don’t like it when you do that,” Dorrie said, turning to scowl at him. He rolled his eyes and extinguished the flame.

“I’m _bored_ ,” he said. He was supposed to be taking it easy following the incident with the bomb he’d disarmed – or rather, the explosion he’d absorbed. He still felt a little weak and shaky, but he was apparently well enough for Reed to stop running tests and Sue to stop fussing. As terrible as he’d felt, the attention had been pretty nice.

“You could have died,” Reed had told him, wide-eyed the way Johnny had never seen him. “How did you know you could that?”

Johnny hadn’t known. He just hadn’t seen an alternative.

What he wasn’t well enough for was Reed’s scheduled trip out to Monster Island, so he’d been left on his own to mope around.

“Come on,” Dorrie said, twisting to fiddle with her webcam. “We’ll do one of those ‘my boyfriend does my makeup’ videos, it’ll be a hit.”

“Okay, but I’m probably going to draw a mustache or a third eye on you or something,” he huffed, leveraging himself up.

The weekend only dragged on from there. Johnny spent most of it on the couch, feeling sorry for himself. The Human Torch, superhero, celebrity, and what was he doing? Lying around watching racing and going through Ben’s popcorn stash. He felt tired deep down in a way that only halfway had to do with the explosion he’d absorbed and released.

He was supposed to speak at a high school the next day, but he kind of wanted to cancel. He’d been sick with nerves the first few speaking engagements he’d done, waiting after for questions, comments, the words on his back practically tingling. But the guy – Johnny had always known it was a guy, somehow, had always pictured someone lanky with strong shoulders and narrow waist – hadn’t been among those crowds. He wouldn’t be in this one, either.

Johnny slipped his hand up under his shirt, palm pressed to the small of his back.

“Sometimes, dude, I kind of hate you,” he announced the empty room, but it wasn’t true. His soulmate wasn’t the one he hated.

 

* * *

 

He didn’t cancel at the end. He didn’t know why – maybe he couldn’t take another day moping around the Baxter Building, or maybe he didn’t feel like facing Sue’s disappointment when she, Ben, and Reed got home that night.

It went okay. Words on his back or no, Johnny wasn’t great at giving speeches. He stumbled over a few words, played around with a few little flame tricks, but mostly he smiled. Johnny had learned pretty early on that when you had looks like his, you didn’t really need to do much else. The super powers didn’t exactly hurt, either.

He said one personal thing at the end of his speech, gaze sweeping out over the crowd.

“The important thing is to never give up,” he said, the real reason he hadn’t faked some cosmic emergency and canceled. There was always, always that tiny spark of hope, his gaze catching on faces in the crowd, wondering _what if_. “Remember that – never give up!”

He hung around a little afterwards, just like always, answering questions. It felt kind of nice to be around people his own age again, not that he’d ever had much in the way of friends before. One thing he never could turn down: being the center of attention.

He was telling one girl a story about Ben and a vat full of shaving cream when a hand landed on his shoulder.

Johnny turned and saw a student – brown hair, brown eyes, a pair of glasses that looked fake. Johnny’s own height. Kind of average, and wearing a truly terrible shirt. His gaze was intense. Johnny didn’t know how he should feel, being looked at like that.

Then the guy opened his mouth: “I want to thank you for that speech. I’ll never forget what you said today,” the briefest swallow. Johnny’s heart was beating a mile a minute. Everything felt tingly. “It meant a lot to me!”

He squeezed Johnny’s shoulder, too hard, and then he turned on his heel and ran the other way, leaving Johnny standing there, gaping, the entire world narrowed down to where that hand had touched his shoulder.

“Torch?” the girl he’d been talking to said, snapping him out of it.

“Who was that?” he asked the crowd, dizzy with it – that had been _him_. That had been – Johnny had never imagined it this way, had never imagined feeling _so much_. He craned his neck but he couldn’t see him anymore, and the crowd around him was only pushing in further. “Who was that guy? The one who just touched me?”

There was a vague mumble through the crowd, but no name. Johnny’s blood was going to boil. “Come on! The guy who just grabbed my shoulder! Brown hair, brown eyes, glasses – who _was_ that?”

“What? You mean Puny Parker?” one of the kids, a tall blond boy, finally said. He held up his thumbs and forefingers in circles over his eyes like round glasses. “What do you wanna know for, Torch?”

“Because he’s my soulmate!” Johnny shouted, fingertips trailing sparks, heat rising like a wave inside of him.

The crowd fell silent. Johnny took a harsh breath, trying to get his powers back under tight control.

“Please,” he said. “He said my words. He’s my soulmate.”

“No way,” the blond boy finally said at last, looking a little like he might pass out. “Peter Parker is the Human Torch’s soulmate? No fucking way.”

Johnny ignored the overwhelming urge to set the guy’s pants on fire and turned to the crowd.

“Please, he goes here, right?” he said. “Who has his phone number? His address?” Nobody answered. Johnny’s hands curled into fists, his nails digging into his palms. “Seriously? He goes here and _none_ of you know his number?”

His soulmate, Johnny’s heart said, beating hard against his ribs. His soulmate, who had looked into Johnny’s eyes so earnestly and told him thank you for a bunch of words Johnny had made up on the fly – Stay In School-style stuff when all Johnny had ever been good for were “Miss Storm, we really have to talk about Johnny’s grades” conferences. His soulmate, and nobody here had bothered to get to know him well enough to have so much as a phone number.

A blonde girl raised her hand, tentatively. “I, um. I do.”

“Liz!” the boy hissed.

“Shut up, Flash!” Liz said. “Peter said his words!”

For the first time since he’d heard the words, Johnny remembered how many people were in the auditorium. Kids with phones, taking photos. Heat crept up the back of his neck; the publicity people Reed had hired were going to have kittens.

None of it mattered, though. Johnny’s soulmate had looked him in the eyes and he had said the words and he had _meant_ them.

“Please,” Johnny said to Liz. “I need to find him – I need to say something back to him.”

Liz looked around and made a decision.

“Anyone comes after us, tackle them! Or I’ll never speak to you again!” she told Flash, grabbing Johnny by the wrist and pulling him away from the crowd.

 

* * *

 

“So,” Johnny said when the coast was clear. His phone buzzed incessantly in his pocket, but he ignored it. That was something to deal with later. “How come you know him, when nobody else…?”

 _Hope I didn’t just steal your boyfriend_ , he almost said.

“Peter was my partner on a project,” Liz explained, hunkered down next to Johnny on the subway. She scrolled through her phone. “I’m going to call him.”

“Why would he say that and then run away?” Johnny asked, restless, unable to stop tapping his feet, biting his lip. He was trying to recall every detail of Peter Parker’s face -- the look in his brown eyes, the slightest hint of a blush, the way his lips had formed the words, the crooked tilt of those fake-looking glasses.

Johnny loved him already.

“I don’t know. Peter’s, well,” Liz said, phone pressed to her ear. “He’s shy, I guess. He’s not picking up. Big surprise.”

She blew a lock of hair out of her face, annoyed. Johnny was relieved, though – they were already on their way towards the Parker home in Queens, and besides, he never could have said those words over the phone.

“What’s he like?” he asked instead, fidgeting with a loose thread on his civilian jeans. He’d pulled a hat down low over face. This wasn’t a thing for Human Torch, celebrity. This was a thing for Johnny Storm, scared out of his wits.

The words had been _nice_. He’d told his soulmate something that had _mattered_ to him. Johnny didn’t know how he’d done it, but he had. It felt like a dream.

“Peter?” Liz said. “He’s, I don’t know. He’s quiet, I guess. He’s not very popular. He’s good at science – he’s really smart. He reads a lot.”

Okay, Johnny thought. He wasn’t good at science himself -- he wasn’t very good at anything in school, and he didn’t read a lot, not since Aunt Mary’s collection of soulmate divination guides and romance novels. But he hadn’t been popular, either, before his powers had suddenly made everyone pay attention. He wasn’t quiet, but it might be nice to have someone who would be that for him.

He imagined kissing that serious mouth, getting those brown eyes to spark. All for him. He touched his fingertips to his lips, stomach full of butterflies.

Liz was watching him. Johnny dropped his hand, trying not to blush.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve just never actually seen anyone, y’know, meet _them_ before. You’re all…”

She waved her hands around.

“I feel like that,” Johnny confessed. “I wish he hadn’t run away.”

 _I’m scared he won’t like me once he knows me for real,_ he couldn’t say, but his face must have said it all.

“It’s a good start, though,” Liz said. “You inspired him, remember? Besides…” She laid her hand over the crook of her elbow, smiling helplessly. “It’s destiny, right?”

“Well,” Johnny said, trying to lighten the mood. “I’m in love with him already.”

He’d meant it as a joke, but it was true. He kept playing the moment over: Peter, saying those words to him, his eyes so intense and his face so serious. Maybe that was what Johnny needed – someone to ground him, someone to keep him in the real world. Someone who would look at him like he was the entirety of their world.

He shivered.

Liz laughed, hand cupped politely in front of her mouth. Johnny hoped they could get to be friends after this – he liked her, her friendly nature, the way she’d taken charge of the situation back at the school.

She was quiet for half a stop, and then she asked, “Does it actually feel like – y’know, fireworks?”

Johnny thought back to the moment – Peter’s hand landing on his shoulder, him twisting to see who was touching him, and then just the moment. Peter had spoken and Johnny hadn’t been able to believe it. He’d imagined it so many times, but never like that: the quiet intensity in Peter’s warm eyes, the unshakable tone of his voice. _I’ll never forget what you said today. It meant a lot to me._

Johnny’s throat was tight.

“So much more,” he said.

The Parker house was a modest two-story house in Forest Hills; it looked a little old in places, but it was pretty. There were flowers by the brick steps, and sun-faded curtains in the windows. It looked like a nice home. It looked happy.

Liz left him on the sidewalk.

“It would be kind of weird if I was there, right?” she said. She grabbed his hand before she left, squeezing. “Hey, good luck. Peter – he’s a really good guy. I’m really happy for both of you.”

He waited until she disappeared around the corner, and then it was just him and the front door. All he had to do was knock.

He’d been less scared facing the Hulk.

“He’s _nice_ ,” he reminded himself. He played it back for what had be the twentieth time already, _I’ll never forget what you said today_ , and before he even realized it his feet had carried him forward, up the brick steps.

An older woman opened the door. She had short, steel grey hair and a furrow between her brows like she was always concerned. Her eyes went wide when she saw him.

“Hi,” he said, raising a hand, trying for a smile. “Are you – you’re Peter Parker’s mom?”

“His aunt,” she said, still staring. “May Parker.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m Johnny Storm, um, the Human Torch.”

“I know who you are, dear, I have turned on the television this month,” she said. Her face fell. “It’s not – has something happened to Peter?”

“What?” he said. “No! No, Peter’s fine, nothing’s – no, something happened, but it’s nothing bad.” He was babbling. His face was burning; he was sure he red all over. He took a deep breath and said it, “Peter’s my soulmate.”

“Oh,” May said, a quiet gasp. Then, louder, “Oh!” and she was grabbing his hands, squeezing them between her own. Johnny laughed, unable to help it. “I can’t believe –”

“Me neither,” Johnny said, grinning, nothing but butterflies in his stomach. “He’s not home? He sort of – he ran.”

“No, I never know where he goes these days,” she said. She squeezed his hand. “He’s shy, Peter, and you’re a celebrity. You’ll have to forgive him.”

“I do,” Johnny said, meaning it. “I just – I _really_ want to see him.”

“You’ll come inside,” May said. “You’ll come inside and I’ll call him, we’ll get him over here… My nephew’s soulmate, I can’t believe it.”

“I’m so nervous!” he said, laughing with it, every dazzling feeling. “What am I going to say to him? His words were so perfect, I don’t want to mess up and just let him have “hey” or whatever. He doesn’t, right? Wait, forget that, don’t tell me anything.”

May Parker’s face fell. “Oh, sweetheart.”

“What?” he asked, laughter dying. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just,” she said, shaking her head, “Peter’s already heard his words. They’re very specific.”

Johnny froze. He remembered, in crystal clarity, being very small, small enough that his family hadn’t completely fallen apart yet, and hanging out in Sue’s room once while she’d talked to one of her friends on the phone. They’d been gossiping about their words. At one point Sue had gone all quiet; Johnny couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation.

Then Sue had said, “Well of course I’ve _thought_ about it, my dad said one of his uncles had that. Like, he heard the words, but then what he said back didn’t match. Totally tragic.” Another pause. “I mean, life goes on, you know? I don’t even know if I want to get married.”

Johnny remembered swallowing thickly, suddenly stabbed by fear. Maybe Sue had known, because she’d reached down to ruffle his hair, and told him she’d give him a dollar if he’d go get her chips from the kitchen.

He remembered lingering in the doorway, listening as the conversation kicked up again.

“Sometimes,” Sue had said with a long dramatic sigh before she started giggling, “I think the Storms are just unlucky in love.”

She’d been right as usual.

“Oh,” he said, staring down at his shoes. He couldn’t look up; his vision was swimming, and he knew what would happen if he looked up. “I think I – I probably misheard, then.”

“Can I do anything –” May Parker started to say, but Johnny just shook his head violently.

“No, I – sorry to bother you,” he said, backing down the steps until he was clear of the house’s shadow. Eyes still blurring so badly he could barely see, he lit up and took off.

 

* * *

**3\. "He's mine."**

May was sitting out on the steps when Peter came home, newly victorious and whistling, and for one terrible moment he was afraid something had happened to Ms. Watson next door, or one of the other neighbors, or to any of the Reilly family up in Massachusetts.

Then May said, “Peter, sit down, please,” and Peter’s blood turned to ice.

She knew. He’d left a glove in the laundry or a neighbor had seen him crawl outside his bedroom window. Somehow, she knew.

“Aunt May,” he stammered out. “I can –”

She held up a hand. “The Human Torch was here a few hours ago.”

Aunt May didn’t know about Spider-Man after all. Peter didn’t know if this was better or worse.

“Oh,” Peter said, quietly. His mind raced – he should have seen this coming. What did he expect Johnny Storm to do, hear those words and not try to find the guy who’d said them? If their positions had been switched – if Peter had been anyone else and things had been simple – it was what he would have done.

“What a horrible mess,” Aunt May said, rubbing at her forehead. She continued before he could ask what she meant. “He spoke at your school today?”

“He did,” Peter confirmed, mind working in furious circles, too fast for once for his mouth to keep up.

“And you spoke to him?” Aunt May pressed. He just nodded. Aunt May dropped her forehead into her hands again. “What a horrible… oh, Peter, I’m glad you weren’t home for it.”

“Aunt May, please just tell me what happened,” he said, touching her shoulder. “You’re freaking me out.”

She twisted toward him, putting her hand on his shoulder – the shoulder where _animated insect_ lay – and said, “The Human Torch came here, and – he thought he was your soulmate, and I had to tell him he was wrong.”

“What?” Peter said, an odd fog coming over him. For a second he thought he hadn’t heard her correctly. “You – told him he wasn’t mine?”

May wrung her hands. “You don’t understand, Peter – he was so excited. I hated to tell him it couldn’t be true, but he’d never spoken to you before, and you’ve already heard your words. The poor thing must have misheard, or… There are always those people who don’t have it returned, and I didn’t want _you_ to have to break that sweet boy’s heart.”

“You told him – you told him he couldn’t be mine,” Peter repeated, feeling numb. His fingers had gone tingly, like he was cold, and he couldn’t – he couldn’t think about Johnny, hearing that he wasn’t Peter’s. “Oh, Aunt May, no – no, he’s mine, it’s him, it’s the Human Torch!”

“What?” Aunt May said, looking up at him with wide eyes.

“He’s mine,” he said, voice breaking, “you don’t understand. It’s him. He’s my soulmate. And he’s --”

And Johnny was out there, thinking he was alone in the world. Peter couldn’t – he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think. He needed to be with him, to tell him – he couldn’t let him think the wrong think one second longer. Peter couldn’t not be with him another moment.

“He’s yours?” May repeated.

“He’s mine,” he said. “He doesn’t – it’s complicated. He doesn’t know he said the words to me, but he did. I swear, Aunt May – he’s ‘animated insect.’”

“How?” she asked, but he knew that on some level she’d already figured it out. His erratic behavior the past few months, starting the same time Spider-Man hit the scene, and now this, his words, the fact that the Human Torch hadn’t known it was Peter he’d said them to – it all added up to one conclusion.

“I promise, I’m going to explain everything to you,” he said. “But, Aunt May, I’m sorry, right now he needs me more.”

Aunt May didn’t reply; she got up, dusting off her knees, and walked back into the house. Fear crept through Peter’s veins like ice. Somewhere deep inside he guessed he’d always expected this reaction; maybe it was why he hadn’t told her from the start.

But she came back after a second, holding the flowers Peter had gotten her a few days ago – equal parts apology and bribe, a silent _I’m sorry, please take these and don’t ask where I go or what I’m not telling you._

“Here,” she said. “You don’t have time to get anything better.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

She thrust the slightly wilted bouquet into his hands. “After everything that boy’s been through today, you had better bring him something.”

Peter laughed, semi-hysterically. He bent to kiss her on the cheek, squeezing her shoulder. “Love you.”

“Go,” she said.

Peter turned on his heel and ran.

 

* * *

 

It was raining by the time Peter got to the Baxter Building and his suit was halfway soaked through. That was just his luck. The flowers May had pressed on him were wilted and waterlogged, but he couldn’t bring himself to drop them.

There was no window open this time. He felt like a creep, crawling across the windows of the top five floors, trying to catch a flash of blond hair. When he did find Johnny, it was like the whole world stopped.

Johnny was sitting in what looked like the living room, his back to the window and his head bowed.

He looked up when Peter rapped on the window, and his eyes were red. Peter’s heart broke as he knocked again, a little harder this time. He could break the window, if he had to, but that wasn’t the kind of second (third?) impression he wanted to make.

“Hey, flame brain!” he shouted. “Let me in!”

“Go _away_ ,” Johnny snapped, rising from the sofa and wrenching the window open. He wasn’t wearing the uniform anymore, just a soft-looking t-shirt and jeans. Peter’s fingers itched to touch him.

“I can’t,” he said, the honest truth.

“Bug off, would you?” Johnny said, so miserably that Peter’s own heart felt like it was breaking. “I’m not kidding, Spider-Man, I had a terrible day. I’m having kind of a terrible life, actually, so if you could just take a long walk off a short pier –”

“Why don’t you tell your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man all about it?” Peter asked, crouched on the windowsill. He wanted to reach for him, to pull him in against himself. Johnny glowered at him and flipped him one flaming finger.

“You’re playing with fire here, Spider-Man,” he said, sparks in his eyes. Peter sucked in a breath. “Just go away!”

“I can’t,” Peter said, forcing himself to be honest – just honest. Not funny. Not smart. Just truthful. He couldn’t leave, not without setting the record straight.

If Johnny still wanted him to go after that – well, Peter would understand.

“Why the hell not?” Johnny demanded, little flames dancing at the ends of his hair and across the line of his shoulders, flickering like candles. Peter could feel the heat of him, like standing in front of a fire plalce.

“I know you were at Peter Parker’s house,” Peter blurted out. Johnny froze; the flames sputtered and died. “I know what his aunt told you, about his words. And I know why you couldn’t say anything back to him.”

Johnny stared at him, mouth open. “It’s you. You’re why – he’s yours, of course it’s you. You couldn’t just crash my home, you had to ruin my life, too.” And then he was scrubbing at his eyes, sniffing, and Peter was scrambling through the window. He couldn’t let this go on.

“No, Torch,” he said. “Johnny, that’s not –”

“It’s just so _unfair_ ,” Johnny said, a sob in his voice.

“You couldn’t say anything,” Peter took one terrible, shaky breath and ripped the mask off. “Because you already said it.”

Johnny gaped at him. “I don’t – I –”

Peter grabbed the hem of top half of his costume, yanking it up. It got stuck and he struggled with it for a second; when he finally got it off he was sure his hair was everywhere and his face was flushed. Some first impression to make, but wasn’t that just his luck.

“Look,” he said, pressing still gloved fingers just under his words. “Do you remember?”

“That’s it, you animated insect,” Johnny read out. His voice was shaking. “Fun’s over.”

Hearing them again made everything in Peter light up. He grinned. “Spiders are arachnids, by the way. Not insects. Just wanted you to know that.”

Johnny’s eyes were wet; Peter’s smile faded. He wanted to reach for him, but he didn’t know if it was okay.

“If I already said them,” Johnny said, voice breaking, “then why did you run away? That was _weeks_ ago!”

“I,” Peter started, but for a second he found he couldn’t continue, not with Johnny looking at him like that. “I was ashamed.”

“Ashamed,” Johnny repeated, his eyes hot, his hands curled into fists. “Of me.”

It was like Peter had been punched in the stomach.

“No,” he said, giving into instinct and taking Johnny by the arms. The first touch was electric, even through Peter’s gloves. “No, no, no no no – don’t _ever_ think that. How could I ever be ashamed of you? Torch, you’re – wow.” He gestured hopelessly at Johnny. “Look at you!”

“Look at me,” Johnny repeated scornfully. “You ran away from me. Twice.”

“Because of _me_ ,” Peter said. “I wasn’t – I’m not. Good enough for you.”

“I don’t understand,” Johnny said, finally leaning towards him. The way he looked at Peter’s face made him feel strangely exposed; he wanted to put the mask back on. He never wanted to put the mask back on again. “You’re Spider-Man…”

Oh, Peter really wanted to kiss him. His palms were sweating; he was glad for the gloves.

“Right, I’m Spider-Man,” Peter said. “Or I’m supposed to be – but really I’m just some broke, stupid kid from Queens. You can see that now. And I came here and – you were right. I wanted money. And I wanted to prove I was, I don’t know, _better_ \-- stronger, faster. I don’t know. And then you said my words, and you were so –”

“Spider-Man,” Johnny said, quietly awed, and Peter couldn’t name half the feelings warring inside his chest.

“You were so much,” Peter said, voice choked.

“Peter,” Johnny corrected himself. He was clearly the bolder one between them – at least here. He leaned in, their foreheads pressed together. Everything in Peter sang at the touch, but he still hadn’t explained. He pulled back – it was painful in a different way than his fall the night before, but it hurt just as badly.

“Johnny,” Peter said. He cupped his face carefully in his gloved palms. “You were right: I came here for – money, power, fame, I don’t know, but it wasn’t right. It wasn’t something I deserved. And then I got you instead.”

“You didn’t want me,” Johnny surmised, frowning. It was like Peter had been hit all over again. How could someone like Johnny – bright and funny, a superhero who didn’t need a mask, indescribably gorgeous – ever even think that?

“No, no, never,” Peter insisted, but that only made Johnny frown more. “I wanted you _so_ much, I – Johnny, all my life, I’ve had “animated insect” written on my skin. You think I ever imagined anyone like you? No, you – you own a mirror, you know you’re basically perfect, right?”

“I don’t get it,” Johnny said, plaintive.

“Yeah, you do,” Peter said. “I came here for money, and then there you were, and I thought I didn’t deserve you.”

Johnny hit him like a hurricane, arms around his shoulders and face buried in the crook of Peter’s neck. Peter was so surprised the impact toppled him over, sending him sprawling to the couch. Johnny ended up practically in his lap and Peter held onto him like his life depended on it – it felt, in that moment, exactly like his life depended on it. He fisted his hands in Johnny’s shirt and just held him, breathing in the clean scent of him.

“That’s not true,” Johnny said, clinging right back. It was like they were magnetic; Peter couldn’t have let go of him for the world.

“Listen,” Peter said, desperate to try and make him understand. “Listen, can you feel it?” He asked because he could – though he couldn’t describe _what_ he was feeling. Words had utterly failed him in the face of it; it was like he’d been walking around with a void in his head and his heart, and now, finally, there was a spark. “Can you feel me?”

Because he could feel Johnny, in the spark. He felt bright and warm and happy, like stretching out in the grass on the best kind of summer day, all blue skies above. Peter could feel a pull towards him, a connection wherever he touched Johnny, joy and confusion and a fear that Peter would leave him all bleeding through. As if Peter ever could.

Behind all that there was the tiny, aching suspicion that Johnny didn’t like himself very much.

“I ran away the first time because I didn’t deserve you,” Peter said. “I ran away the second time because you gave me the courage to go up against Doc Ock again. I beat him, Johnny -- you gave me that. I’m not running away anymore. Can you feel that?”

“I feel it,” Johnny said. His eyes fluttered shut, like he was just focusing on it, the sensation Peter felt wherever they touched. He grabbed at Peter’s hand, bringing it behind to him, to rest up under his shirt at the very small of his back. “Here. Want to see?”

All Peter could feel was the thin fabric of his gloves against bare skin, but he could imagine it – his words, printed on Johnny’s skin, right there under his fingers.

“Maybe in a minute,” he said. Moving felt impossible; he wanted to keep the two of them here in this perfect moment, possibly forever, Johnny safe in his arms.

“Can I ask you a question?” Johnny said after they had spent a long minute just breathing together, Peter’s hands laced behind Johnny’s back.

“You just did,” he said, betting on it making Johnny groan in exasperation, delighted when he was right. “Yes. Anything, anything you want.”

Johnny nodded a little, pink tongue darting out to lick his lips. Peter tracked the motion with a guilty-hot flash – Johnny must have noticed because he smiled, a faint blush high across his face. What had Peter done to deserve him? Nothing, but he had him anyway. He was going to earn that, somehow – be better. Be the best he could be. Be Spider-Man.

“Okay,” Johnny said. “Have you ever kissed anyone?”

Peter felt himself start to blush. The answer was no, not really -- Jessica Cambell had pecked him on the lips in fifth grade on a dare and then refused to look at him for a week. Peter didn’t quite think that counted. He felt embarrassed admitting that to Johnny, who had almost certainly been kissed before.

Uncle Ben had told him, though – “There’re only two people in this world you don’t lie to under any circumstances: the IRS, and whoever says those words to you.”

“No,” Peter admitted, licking his lips. They were dry, and kind of cracked, and probably wouldn’t be great to kiss. Not like Johnny’s, which looked soft. “Not really.”

Johnny’s smile was so bright. “Okay, cool, because I don’t want to brag –”

“The top said line of everyone who has ever loved to brag,” Peter laughed, trying to squash the nervous butterflies in his stomach.

“But I am a really good kisser,” Johnny finished. He fidgeted, fingers dancing at the back of Peter’s neck. “So can I…?”

Peter pressed their mouths together before Johnny got a chance to finish asking. It was clumsy, it was overeager, but Johnny’s lips really were soft against his. It felt right, especially when Johnny started to guide the kiss, coaxing past Peter’s clumsiness. His fingertips slipped to touch the edge of the words and, _oh_ , that was sparks and fireworks. Peter could do this forever.

“You got it,” Johnny mumbled. He pulled back, only to press their foreheads together, sighing happily. “You got me.”

Peter palmed the place where Johnny’s words lay under his shirt, giddy. “Other way around, livewire.”

“Livewire?” Johnny repeated curiously, tilting his head to kiss Peter softly. Just the easy press of his lips made Peter so happy he didn’t know what to do with himself.

“Just something my uncle used to say,” he said. He lowered his voice, a poor facsimile of Uncle Ben’s warm tones, and recited, “’You’ve got a funny soulmate, Pete! A real livewire!’”

Johnny laughed out loud with pure delight, and it was the best thing Peter had ever heard. His fingers drifted, slowly, to trace the words at Peter’s shoulder. Peter shivered; he never, ever wanted Johnny stop.

“He sounds nice,” Johnny said, smiling. “I can’t wait to meet him.”

Peter tried not to let it hurt too much; still, he had to shut his eyes against the sudden sting.

“I wish you could,” he said, squeezing at Johnny’s waist. “He would’ve liked you, but he’s – and my parents –”

Johnny made quiet shushing noises, kissing the corner of Peter’s mouth, his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding painfully earnest. Quietly, “I wish you could have met my parents, too. They would’ve – this girl, Liz, at your school. She said you’re really smart. My dad, he was a doctor. He would have been happy.”

“I’m,” Peter said, distracted by the touch of Johnny’s lips. “Yeah, I’m okay, I guess.”

“You can still meet my family again, though,” Johnny murmured. “The right way. They’ll like you when you’re not breaking into our home.”

“Please don’t remind me,” Peter groaned. “I was – I wanted to impress you. Show you guys what I can do, how strong I am…”

“You definitely made an impression,” Johnny said, laughter coloring his voice. Everything about him was so _bright_ \-- Peter felt a little like he was holding a star. A star who was ducking his head to kiss him again, bolder this time; Peter fought to catch up. He almost whimpered when Johnny broke away. “How strong?”

“Um,” Peter said. “Strong. You – you don’t weigh anything to me.”

“Oh,” Johnny said, eyes gone all wide. Peter swallowed hard. “That’s – what else can you do?”

“Um,” Peter said, feeling a little distracted by the hitch of Johnny’s voice, the negligible weight of him settled across Peter’s thighs. “I’m fast. I can stick to walls. I’ve got this, I don’t know how to describe it, like a precognitive danger sense. Lets me know when I need to duck, mostly.”

“Webs?” Johnny asked.

“No, that’s…” Peter took, with great difficulty, one hand away from Johnny’s skin so he could first tap at the side of his head, then fumble with his glove. He stripped it off, revealing the webshooter underneath, the device he’d built himself by cell phone light in the dead of the night. “I built these.”

Johnny turned Peter’s hand over in his, tracing the metal.

“Careful,” Peter said, swallowing, but Johnny’s touch was delicate. He lingered at the point where the webshooters ended, fingertips pressed to the sensitive underside of Peter’s wrist.

“How does it work?” Johnny asked.

“Trigger’s here, see, at my palm,” Peter shifted a little, holding Johnny steady with the arm still around his waist and leaning around him. He scanned the room for a good target. “So when I press down like this…”

He pressed his middle and ring fingers to the trigger and fired a webline at a particularly ugly leather armchair across the room.

“That was Ben’s favorite chair,” Johnny said, quietly awed. “He’s going to kill you.”

“Nah,” Peter said, grinning up at him. “It dissolves in an hour. You can touch it.”

He bit his tongue a moment later, aware that maybe that was a weird thing to say, but Johnny only reached out to tweak the webline that stretched from Peter’s wrist to the Thing’s ugly leather armchair.

“That is _weird_ ,” he said, tracing his index finger down across it as far as he could reach. “Good weird, though.”

Peter laughed, flicking his wrist and breaking the line off. His hand fell to the small of Johnny’s back again. “Says the guy who can light on fire. You’re – you’re the first person I’ve ever told.”

“What, that they can light on fire?” Johnny said.

Peter laughed. “You’re the first person I’ve ever taken the mask off for.”

He watched that dawn on Johnny, watched the frown tug at his mouth. He was tracing his words on Peter’s skin again. “Your aunt didn’t know.”

“No,” Peter said. “Although I think she does now. Kind of hard not to put it together, between you and, you know, the fact that she’s known for fifteen years that someone was going to call me an insect at some point.”

“And nobody at your school…?” Johnny said.

“No, no,” Peter shook his head. “Nobody. Boring Peter Parker? No way.”

“Not boring,” Johnny said. “Why? If people knew, they’d lose it over you. You’d be really famous.”

Peter shrugged, unsure how to explain. “Because what I do, what Spider-Man does… it’s not about that. I tried to make it be, once. Somebody else paid the price. I can’t do that again – that’s my responsibility.” He shut his eyes against the sting, just holding onto Johnny for a long moment, aware his grip was maybe a little too tight. Johnny let him, though, just stroking his shoulder with his warm fingers. “Besides, I think you might have already made me kind of famous today.”

“I ruined your life,” Johnny groaned, dropping his forehead against Peter’s shoulder.

“No, in keeping with theme, _I_ ruined my life,” Peter said. “You – you’re wonderful.”

He meant it, which was terrifying and real and suddenly _everything_.

“You have a mask,” Johnny said, raising his head, eyebrows furrowed. Peter gave into the urge, tilting his head to kiss the little line between his brows. It was like now that he had permission to touch, he couldn’t stop. His lips and the palms of his hands tingled. “You have a mask and I haven’t been able to go outside without getting photographed since we moved into the building, I – I’m gonna ruin your life.”

“No, c’mon, don’t be like that,” Peter said, heart in his throat. He thought of how crushing the weight of his defeat had felt, just twelve hours before, and how it had lifted with just a handful of words from Johnny. How Johnny saying _the important thing to remember is to never give up_ had been all it took to make Peter suddenly believe that was true. “Johnny, I’m pretty sure you just saved my life today.”

He’d almost thrown away being Spider-Man. He would have, if it hadn’t been for Johnny.

Peter kissed him again, fiercely, desperately, pouring everything he felt into it as his fingers traced the letters he still hadn’t seen on Johnny’s back.

“This is what matters. The rest, the mask – I’ll figure that out. Understand?” he asked when they broke apart for air.

“Yeah, okay. We’ll figure it out,” Johnny breathed. “But maybe you should kiss me again anyway.”

Peter made to do just that.

The lights flicked on; until that moment, Peter hadn’t even realized that it was dark. The other three Fantastics stood in the doorway, Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman at the front and the Thing huge at their backs. They were all gaping – Peter hadn’t actually known that anyone’s jaw could drop as far as Mr. Fantastic’s had.

Then, with a cold panicky flash, he realized the picture they presented: Spider-Man with his mask and shirt off, hands gripping Johnny’s waist tight, Johnny in his lap with his shirt rucked up so Peter could touch skin, and both of their mouths red and their hair disheveled. The wet, ruined flowers lying abandoned on the couch next to them.

“I can explain,” Peter said, mouth on autopilot.

“Guys! Spider-Man’s my soulmate,” Johnny said at the same time, beaming at his family like he wasn’t being held like a human shield by the Bugle’s #1 Most Wanted.

Somewhere along the line, Peter’s life had gotten very complicated.

Ben Grimm was the first to react.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” he said, wandering back down the hall. “Maybe get a lil somethin’ stronger for Suzie-Q…”

 

* * *

 

“This is ridiculous,” Peter said for the fiftieth time.

He had one arm around Johnny’s waist, idly playing with the hem of his shirt. His thumb brushed against the words every few seconds, making Johnny shiver. He didn’t even think Peter realized he was doing it, and he had to figure out how he was going to stop him – or if he was going to stop him -- before their interview started.

They’d had two whole weeks, just to themselves. Now it was time to talk to the world, if only so Johnny would be able to go outside again without being totally mobbed.

“This is my life,” Johnny said, leaning into Peter’s touch. He reached up to tweak him on the forehead.“I told you, you don’t have to do this with me. I can speak for both of us.”

“I know what you told me,” Peter said, scowling. His hand slipped a little further up under Johnny’s shirt, rubbing at the spot where _I’ll never forget_ lay. Johnny scoffed, rolling his eyes. If there was one thing he’d learned about Peter over the past two weeks it was that once he thought he should do something, neither hell or high water could keep him from doing it.

Even if he complained about it the whole time. Loudly. Right in Johnny’s ear.

“You’re the one who kept complaining about all the gossip,” Johnny reminded him. “I didn’t care.”

There had been a lot of gossip. Johnny had announced to a room full of teenagers that he’d found his soulmate – a 15-year-old nerd from Queens. Of course there was a lot talk, and not all of it nice. Johnny wished it hadn’t happened that way, out in the open – he wished it had been private. It should have been in private. He wished he knew how to keep his big mouth shut.

“Not your fault,” Peter said every time Johnny brought up. He usually followed the statement by kissing Johnny thoroughly – for someone who had never been kissed before, Peter was a fast learner, and he always waited until Johnny couldn’t think of anything else besides Peter’s mouth on his own before he said, “It’s my fault.”

If Peter being a fast learner was a pro, then his massive guilt complex was definitely a con. Johnny was willing to work on it.

The rampant rumors, though – those had to be dealt with first, if only because Peter was, in his own words, itching to web TMZ’s entire staff upside down by their ankles outside in front of the Port Authority.

His aunt, meanwhile, had thrown a tennis racket at a paparazzo.

“We don’t play tennis, so I don’t know where she got that,” was Peter’s only comment on the subject. Johnny was beginning to think it ran in the family.

The gossip didn’t bother him, for the most part. He was young, gorgeous, super-powered and he’d found his soulmate – who was also young, gorgeous, and secretly _Spider-Man_. What wasn’t there to love about that?

Except there had even been a couple publicity stunt claims – which, ouch, Johnny was a self-professed fame whore, but some things were still sacred – that Peter had taken particular offense to, chin set on Johnny’s shoulder.

“Who wrote that?” he’d said, his arms locked tight around Johnny’s waist, and then two seconds later when Johnny snorted, “I’m asking because I’m going to fight them.”

“Welcome to the world of celebrity gossip,” Johnny had told him, leaning back against him, but Peter refused to be soothed. “You can’t fight everyone who says something about me that you don’t like.”

“First, they’re talking about me, too. A paid actor? Seriously? And second, watch me,” Peter said, sucking a kiss to the side of Johnny’s neck. Peter was, luckily, pretty easy to distract; Johnny really didn’t want to be responsible for the Bugle’s latest tirade against Spider-Man.

“Do you know what the best part of finding you is?” Johnny’s asked, tugging playfully at Peter’s messy hair. “I can finally go shirtless in public.”

Peter had made a noise somewhere between an offended squawk and a growl.

His words were everywhere, now. He’d posted the photo the second day, when the buzz was already everywhere, his name trending on every site and everyone asking if it was true that he’d found his soulmate. Peter had been one to take the photo – Peter had been taking a lot of photos, and Johnny wasn’t too proud to admit he’d been doing a lot of preening, trying to entice another flash of that camera, the weighty drag of Peter’s gaze – and Johnny had immediately it everywhere. In the photo he was standing in front of the window, his back bare and the words standing out stark against his skin, just above the line of his jeans. He captioned it simply: _He said it_ , and tagged all of Peter’s incredibly empty social media accounts.

A personal photographer for a boyfriend; yet another perk of the deal.

(The downside? Peter was fussy about photos. He’d made faces at the black and white filter Johnny had slapped over it.)

There were still people claiming it was fake, of course, but one of the top comments made Johnny smile: _I was there. It’s real._ \-- queenliz01.

The interview went fine, for the most part. Peter was stiff and awkward at the beginning, stumbling over his words, but he followed after Johnny’s lead, just like Johnny had coached, and didn’t scowl too much or at any point climb out the window to go fight weird crime. Johnny was pretty proud.

“I mean, yeah, we had to adjust to each other at first,” Peter was saying, arm stretched out across Johnny’s shoulders. “We’re pretty different people…”

“Are we?” Johnny asked him, raising his eyebrows.

“I’ve never put mayonnaise on a hot dog, hot stuff,” Peter said, rolling his eyes. Johnny shoved an elbow in his ribs, and Peter directed his attention back towards the interview and away from ridiculous three hour arguments about condiments. “We’re from pretty different backgrounds – there’s always going to be an adjustment period, going from my normal life to his personal tower over here.”

“Sort of like The Prince and the Pauper,” the interviewer suggested, smile just a little smug. Everyone wanted to make the story about that, poor Peter Parker and rich Johnny Storm. Like Peter wasn’t Johnny’s rock, steady and dependable, strong like Johnny hadn’t known people could actually be. Like Johnny had always had money himself. He briefly thought about melting her shoes to the floor.

“I mean, I don’t think if I put on a Fantastic Four uniform anybody would mistake me for him, but sure,” Peter said, a little too sharply. He got the elbow again.

“There’s been a lot of talk about your relationship online,” the interviewer said. “A lot of discussion about the validity of it, whether it’s a publicity stunt.” Peter bristled; Johnny did too, but he grabbed Peter by the elbow and held him steady. “Peter, a big part of that has been your refusal to reveal your words. Why is that?”

“It’s… they’re different, for me,” Peter said. “Personal. I mean, I’m fine with him showing off –”

“Showing off?” Johnny echoed incredulously.

“Yes, you’re a big, flashy show-off,” Peter said, grinning. “But that’s not me. I don’t care what anyone on the internet says, I want mine to be private, you know? Just for me and him.” He traded a look with Johnny. “For now, anyway.”

They’d been talking about it, a little – when they weren’t busy with all the kissing or trying to figure out every little thing about the other, favorite foods and movies, all the places they suddenly wanted to see and things they wanted to do together. Peter had a whole world that was suddenly Johnny’s world, too, and Johnny didn’t know a single thing about it. He liked it. It was exciting. Reed was right; he’d always been meant to be an explorer, and learning how to make Peter laugh so hard he almost choked on soda was the world’s best adventure.

But now Johnny’s world was Peter’s, too, and a big part of that was the public eye. He’d been sick and Peter had been outraged, the first time anyone had run a story about his uncle, his parents. _Human Torch’s Soulmate’s Tragic Story_. Once a little of the rage had bled out of the grief – a very long night on the town in spandex – Peter had sagged back against a wall and said, “Someone’s going to figure it out.”

Johnny thought it was possible. The note in Peter’s voice made him wish, for the first time, that they all had masks.

“I’ll say one thing,” Peter said, grin turning a little sly. Johnny knew what was coming; he groaned and rolled his eyes. “Just one thing!”

“Get it over with already,” Johnny said. To the reporter, he said, “I hate this, by the way.”

“You love it,” Peter accused. Johnny huffed, wrapping his arm around Peter’s shoulders and letting his thumb rest right over _insect_. “This is the only thing I’ll say about my words: the Human Torch should absolutely not go into entomology.”

“Entomology?” the reporter repeated.

“Look it up,” Peter said, grinning.

“I am so sorry about him,” Johnny said.

“Well,” said the reporter, “that certainly raises more questions than it answered.”

“Ignore him,” Johnny said. “He thinks he’s funny.”

“I _am_ funny,” Peter corrected, but afterwards he let Johnny steer the conversation, his thumb stroking up and down over his words through his shirt.

“Really?” Johnny said afterwards when they were more or less alone in his living room – Ben shouting at a football game was just background noise at this point. “Entomology?”

“I just can’t see you going into it,” Peter said, grinning. He tapped at his own shoulder. “After all, pretty boy – spiders aren’t insects.”

“You’re never going to let that one go, are you?” Johnny said.

“Nope,” Peter said, reeling him in close. “Not for one single day.”

Johnny was okay with that.

**Author's Note:**

> \- A lot of the dialogue in this fic comes directly from Amazing Spider-Man #1 and #3 -- I tried to keep as much as of the original dialogue as I could, though in some cases (Reed Richards) the character had shifted far enough that it actually read out of character to do that. And then there was Ock where I was like, nah, still this guy. Comics!
> 
> \- Dorrie Evans, youtube star, was [teenbrigades'](teenbrigades.tumblr.com) idea. Thank you for all the brainstorming!
> 
> \- For those who haven't read _Alias_ , Jessica Cambell would probably be better known to you as Jessica Jones.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Come hang out with me [on tumblr](traincat.tumblr.com) for more Spideytorch!


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